Raspberry Pi has emerged as world’s third best-selling general purpose computer

NewYork ,March21:Raspberry Pi has emerged as the world’s third best-selling general purpose computer of all time, according to latest reports. Over 12.5 million Raspberry Pi boards have been sold in the last five years, beating the previous record held by the Commodore 64.

“The Commodore 64 had, until recently, the distinction of being the third most popular general purpose computing platform,” Eben Upton told a crowd at the fifth birthday party. “That’s what I’m here to celebrate,” he said, “we are now the third most popular general purpose computing platform after the Mac and PC.”

Upton revealed that the company had initially thought that it would only be able to produce 10,000 to 20,000 boards. The company has been able to surpass all expectations, and the device has emerged as its best-selling model till date, accounting for one-third of all Pi sales.

“When we started Raspberry Pi, we had a simple goal: to increase the number of people applying to study Computer Science at Cambridge,” said Foundation founder Upton then. “By putting cheap, programmable computers in the hands of the right young people, we hoped that we might revive some of the sense of excitement about computing that we had back in the 1980s with our Sinclair Spectrums, BBC Micros and Commodore 64s. At the time, we thought our lifetime volumes might amount to 10,000 units if we were lucky.”

The PC and Mac hold the number one and two positions respectively, so that is as high the Raspberry Pi is expected to go. The company recently launched the Raspberry Pi Zero W which sold over 100,000 units in just the first four days on sale.